Charts can make clear too often what words only obscure. Take this arresting graphic, contained in a new Congressional Research Service study made available by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists (CRS reports are generated solely for congressional use, and aren’t released to the public; Aftergood gets a lot of them somehow and shares them though the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, which he runs).

Bottom line, through 10 a.m. Washington time November 16, 1,723 Americans have died in and around Afghanistan, and 14,837 have been wounded. Over the course of the decade-long war, about half the KIAs – 890 – have occurred in 2010 and 2011; as have two-thirds of – 10,060 – of the woundings.